Trump Was in Contact With Epstein Long After Saying He’d Cut Him Off
Donald Trump and his allies stayed connected to Jeffrey Epstein well after they claimed they had stopped communicating.The president has long asserted that his close friendship with the child sex trafficker ended after the duo had a falling out over real estate in Palm Beach, ultimately nixing contact altogether after 2006, when a grand jury indicted Epstein on state charges related to prostitution. That same year, Trump banned Epstein from Mar-a-Lago (though Epstein publicly denied the finale of his membership at the time).But documents published Friday amid the Justice Department’s larger rollout of another tranche of the Epstein files indicate that Trump’s narrative is far from the entire story.An email out of the trove, issued by Epstein to an individual named William Riley, revealed that the sex trafficker was planning to call Trump as late as 2011.“Before I call Trump, with regard vrginina ,, are there any other alternatives,” Epstein wrote on April 18, 2011.It is not clear who Riley is, though a decorated Iraq War veteran known as William Sascha Riley was identified in November as another one of Epstein’s victims by Substack writer Lisa Noelle Voldeng. Riley claimed his adoptive father, William “Bill” Kyle Riley, worked as a pilot for Epstein and trafficked him to the global predator.As it turns out, Trump’s friends had similarly malleable principles. In an interview with the New York Post podcast in October, Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick recalled an instance in 2005 when Epstein—who was at the time his Upper East Side neighbor—invited him to tour his infamous East 71st Street townhouse.“I say to him, ‘Massage table in the middle of your house? How often do you have a massage?’” Lutnick told the Post. “And he says, ‘Every day.’ And then he gets, like weirdly close to me, and he says, ‘And the right kind of massage.’”“In the six to eight steps it takes to get from his house to my house, my wife and I decided that I will never be in the room with that disgusting person ever again,” he added.But seven years after that visit, Lutnick was reaching out to Epstein to coordinate a family trip to the financier’s “pedophile island.”“Hi Jeff, we are landing in St. Thomas early Saturday afternoon and planning to head over to St. Bart’s/Anguilla on Monday at some point. Where are you located (what is exact location for my captain)? Does Sunday evening for dinner sound good?” Lutnick wrote to Epstein in 2012, according to an email made public by the DOJ Friday.Lutnick then mentioned he was traveling alongside another couple, and that both couples had four children each, before listing out the specific ages of all the children who would be traveling to the island with them.Five years later, Epstein was donating to a charity of Lutnick’s choice, according to a 2017 email between Epstein and Lutnick’s associate.